Our Sunday day trip

France-Méteo was set to rain on our Sunday, so we decided to pack the umbrellas and set off to Deauville, the paramount summer resort on the French side of the Channel.

At Bastille métro station the quais were unpeopled, the trains almost totally empty. At Châtelet we changed to the driverless train on line 14th towards Saint Lazare station. This line was inaugurated in its full length in 2007, and the technology has proven so successful that line 1, crossing Right Bank Paris from East to West (Défense to Château de Vincennes) is being outfitted for automation. Line 1 was already famous for running on rubber tires instead of steel wheels.





It takes two hours from Saint Lazare to Deauville Trouville, with a stop at Lisieux, site of the shrine to Saint Therèse of the Child Jésus with its large hilltop cathedral. Nicknamed the twenty-first Paris arrondissement, because of its closeness to Paris, Deauville is a very popular and posh seaside resort, the center of the Côte aux Fleurs.



The beneficent nature of bathing in sea-water was popularized by the 1822 visit to Dieppe by the Duchess of Berry, although it had been popular in England since the last decades of the 18th Century. The main resort on the estuary of the Touques river was Trouville, and when the town built a sea-break wall and mole, the river diverted a lot of sand onto the neighboring marshes. In the 1860s a group of entrepreneurs, led by a local physician, invested 360,000 francs in the purchase of the marshes adjoining the magnificent beach. They interested the Duc de Morny, Napoléon III’s half-brother and noted financier, in the venture. Avid horseman, Morny promoted the construction in 1862 of a race-track and in 1863 the extension of the rail line from Lisieux to facilitate communication with Paris. The developers then started planning the layout of the new town, modeling it on the plans that Haussmann was developing for Paris, so that a Parisian would feel immediately at ease on arrival.


Bathers, by Boudin, 1863

The rich and famous began building summer residences in Deauville, and Normandie became the horse-breeding center of France. The heyday of Deauville came shortly before the First World War when Monsieur Le Hoc, town mayor, met with the manager of the famous Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, and set in motion the building of a Casino, a boardwalk and the major hotels, the Normandy and the Royal. Paul Poiret, noted Parisian fashion designer, opened a boutique in Deauville and Coco Chanel, as yet unknown, followed suit on the way to her fabulous career. After the First World War a second race-track was built, as well as a golf course, The crazy years were on!

Everybody came to Deauville in the summer to see and be seen. Painters like Raoul Dufy and Picasso, musicians like Satie and Stravinsky, horse-lovers, golfers, financiers, financier wannabes, mountebanks, bookies, poets like Apollinaire and his friend Paul Guillaume, the collector and gallerist, as well as all kind of gawkers and hangers-on rubbed shoulders on the race-tracks, in the streets and at the parties.

Claude Lelouch made his film “A Man and a Woman” in Deauville and was awarded the 1966 Cannes Palme d’Or. Nowadays Deauville hosts two film festivals every year, the American and the Asian.


Place de Morny

We came to Deauville because I am a sucker for seasonal towns out of season. They look melancholic, its character uncloaked by the crowds. We had also taken the precaution of coming well prepared for the continuous rain forecast, and therefore not only did it not rain, but was somewhat sunny all day. So we strolled from the station towards the center of town, in search of the tourist bureau. The townscape was inviting and polished, favoring the fake half-timbered architecture called Norman. Houses are two or three stories high on average, and the sidewalk spaces offer an assortment of boutiques, cafés and restaurants, as expected in such a fashionable place. Streets are clean and well groomed, parking stripes fresh and gleaming.. The main square is called (a bit obviously) Duc de Morny, and is laid out in star form, like the Étoile in Paris, assembling eight spokes. But soon the town reverts to an orderly grid pattern, all right angles and squares. The main shopping area is around the Casino, with the usual luxury goods like Sonya Rykiel, Eric Bompard, Ralph Lauren, etc.

The Tourist office, where we got a town map and a restaurant list, is next to Town Hall, a timbered, turreted extravaganza, bedecked with yellow, tan and crimson hardy mums. Conversely the Casino, the original one from 1912, was thoroughly disappointing, sporting the usual claustrophobic red-velvet wrapped, twinkly appearance of most casinos in the world, except in Las Vegas. The basement houses a movie theater.



We walked along the boardwalk on the edge of the immense, carefully tended and combed sands of the stupendous beach, several miles long and half a mile wide, with an outgoing tide. Beyond the horizon, unseen but certain lay Dover’s white cliffs. We roamed out to the end of a jetty to a lighthouse marking the entrance to the harbor basin, where we lingered to watch the sail boats catch the lively breeze, lean into the wind and split the oncoming waves into plumes of spray. Then we turned around towards the boardwalk along the beach with a long row of cabins named after film stars from all countries. In summer, according to the postcards, you can also rent umbrellas with surround curtains to ensure your modesty while changing. On this Sunday the beach was populated by kite flyers, sand buggy riders, or families just soaking their feet, shoes in hand. Dads carried giggling ecstatic little girls on their shoulders, mothers ran after energetic four year olds. And dogs are banned from the beach, not a bad idea.



At around one pm we started looking for a place to eat. I kept pulling us towards the sea and we discovered precisely the place we had hoped for, called Bar de la Mer (Sea bar), with tables in the open, sheltered from the wind by plexiglass partitions, and heated with those propane powered mushrooms that transform al-fresco dining into all-warm meals. We eagerly sat down to an excellent menu of oysters and a grilled bar (a fish) with braised fennel for me; a sauteed salmon filet with braised endives for Linda; and a nice bottle of crisp Sancerre.

And we sat there on November 15th enjoying the wintery English Channel sky streaked with blue, greyish clouds lazily drifting by, looking at the quiet Atlantic, washed-out pale green waves carrying surfers in rubber suits amidst the backward spray. After a lazy hour we picked ourselves up again, walked southward along the beach towards some architecturally distinctive villas in the distance. All were shuttered, and looked asleep. One of them actually sported a crenelated tower. The chains closing the parking lots were encrusted with saline rust, defending empty spaces from non-existent four-wheeled trespassers.

Slowly we circled back to the center of town, past apartment blocks closed for the winter, along straight, plane tree lined streets, now bereft of leaves. We sat again on a café terrace among couples still working on the remnants of their meals. I noticed one pair who, having disposed of half a lobster each and an assortment of shellfish, were relentlessly attacking a tureen of boeuf bourguignon.

Our needs were more modest: coffee and a cassis sorbet and rum raisin ice cream. Then, on our feet again, across the river Touques to Trouville, the town whose thunder was stolen with panache by its parvenu neighbor. This was a working harbor with rusty vessels instead of shiny yachts, the quays lined with light trucks proclaiming that their trade was to grow mussels, “boucholer”, on poles out in the shallow bay. Another Casino here, also run by the Barriere organization, and an establishment offering “cures marines”, marine cures, but some letters had fallen off the sign.

By three o’clock we felt that we had reached the plenitude of what the local deities had to offer and we withdrew towards the train station, physically and spiritually sated. On the trip back I reflected on the quiet charm of these places once they are abandoned by the crowds that overrun them in season. All bluster aside, all passion spent, they go back to their real structure, start breathing and hoping and preparing, like Nature itself, for the renewal, the fun yet to come.